There are many ways of being black and British. More than two million at the last count. Some of these are being celebrated, explored or simply presented this month as part of the BBC’s Black and British season. Programming strands include history, music, football and family life, all of which come together nicely in Back in Time for Brixton, which begins on Monday.

This spin-off from the hugely enjoyable social history series Back in Time For Dinner follows the Irwin family from Dagenham as they go on a time-travelling adventure through 50 years of black British life, recreating interiors, hobbies, talking points and hairdos as they go.

Giles Coren is reprising his presenting role but this time specialist expertise is provided by Emma Dabiri. She is a SOAS fellow in African Studies, a broadcaster and occasional model (her Twitter handle is @thediasporadiva), so there’s plenty to talk about when we meet in the Ritzy cinema’s café, a short walk from Brixton Tube station.

“I think sometimes, when there are attempts at diversity, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ll just pop a black person in there and that’s diversity’,” she says of the need for the BBC’s season. “But here the emphasis is actually on black stories and black people. Representing all those different versions of blackness is really important, especially at this moment when the issue of British identity is such as it is.”

Dabiri’s own story serves as a typically atypical example. Her mother was born to white Irish parents in Trinidad, where Dabiri’s maternal grandfather worked as a civil engineer. Her father was born to black Nigerian parents in Ireland before moving back to Nigeria, and Dabiri herself was raised in her paternal grandparents’ house in Atlanta, Georgia, before returning to Dublin aged five. In summary? “So my mum was Irish but she’s Trinidadian, and my dad’s Nigerian but he’s Irish,” she laughs.

Although Dabiri, 37, has lived in Hackney since 2000, Brixton retains a special place in her imagination. The first time she ever set foot in London was as a child, when her mother brought her to Brixton to have her hair styled: “In comparison with Ireland at the time it seemed like this black utopia.”

Dabiri (lived in Hackney since 2000 (Matt Writtle)

That early experience sparked a long-standing interest in the history and significance of afro hairstyles, which she was able to fully indulge on Back in Time For Brixton. “There was great hair throughout but I probably liked the Forties, Fifties and Eighties best.”

She’s careful about the messages her own appearance conveys. Today she’s wearing an impressive floor-length dress in a contemporary African style, designed by her friend Sindiso Khumalo, with her hair in braids: “I always make a point of wearing naturally textured hairstyles when I’m on television because I want to normalise that appearance.”

BBC drama Back in time for Brixton (Ian Watts/BBC)

This meticulous approach to presentation makes sense when you consider that Dabiri’s look — specifically her perceived racial characteristics — has been taken as fair game for scrutiny by strangers for as long as she can remember. She describes how adolescent summers spent in the predominantly African-American city of Atlanta altered her perspective. “In Ireland, it was like, ‘Oooh, you’re kind of pretty, for a black girl’. Then I went to Atlanta and I became the ideal. I was light-skinned and had my hair in long braids so people thought I had long ‘good hair’… It made me really see the arbitrariness of what’s perceived as beauty.”

London was her escape from all that and moving here immediately after leaving school was, she says, “a huge relief”. She threw herself into the late Nineties nightlife with gusto and can still reel off a list of old haunts: “Corks Wine Bar in the West End; Hanover Grand on a Wednesday Night; Bar Rumba on Sunday; Complex; Colosseum…”

She also took pleasure in the specifically London synthesis that was happening — and still happens — all around. “What I always find kind of lovely is how people who have been historically displaced meet again in Britain and forge a black culture that is inspired by both West Africa and the Caribbean… It’s a nice sort of reconnection.”

Yet in the aftermath of both Brexit and Donald Trump’s electoral victory in the US, she’s noticed a change here too. “I’ve experienced a lot of direct racial abuse in my life — only once or twice in London, but very much in other places — but I have a lot of [London] friends who had never experienced that. I was shocked by the amount of them who, within a week of Brexit, had their first experience of racial abuse.”

7/25
Show time

8/25
Cutting edge

9/25
Craft work

1931: Trainees at an LCC (London County Council) School of Building at Ferndale Road, Brixton are constructing brick fireplaces

Fox Photos/Getty Images

10/25
Brixton bowls

1933: At a bowling match between the mayors of north and south London at the Lambeth Carlton Club Bowling Green at Brixton

Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

11/25
Royal visit

1933: A crowd of children waving union jacks as Queen Mary, wife of King George V, visits Brixton to open the new Lambeth Town Hall

Reg Speller/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

12/25
Bright lights Brixton

Circa 1939: A night in Brixton sees people gathered outside a theatre waiting for the show

Francis M. R. Hudson/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

13/25
Market trading

Circa 1939: A stallholder demonstrating his wares at Brixton Market

Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

14/25
Collecting rubbish

A van equipped with loud speakers visits housewives in the Brixton area to collect their rubbish during the refuse collectors' industrial action

Reg Speller/Getty Images

15/25
Street scene

1952: Street scene in Brixton, London, where many immigrants settled

Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Getty Images

16/25

1952: Leslie King was the first Jamaican immigrant to settle in Brixton He now helps other settlers find their feet in the city

Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Getty Images

17/25
Market time

1952: Shoppers in Brixton market

Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Getty Images

18/25
Rolling stone

Mick Jagger is driven to Brixton prison to begin a three month sentence for drug offence

Keystone/Getty Images

19/25
Correct change

1966: A shop supervisor hands a customer her change in a Tesco Supermarket in Brixton

Daily Mail

20/25
Tube lines

1971: The Queen's cousin, Princess Alexandra travelling in the driver's cab after she had officially opened the extension of the Victoria line to Brixton

Leonard Burt/Central Press/Getty Images

21/25
Changing times

1973: Three houses stand amidst a pile of rubble following the demolition of a slum area of Brixton

Tim Graham/Evening Standard

22/25
Musical youth

1974: The brass section of the Brixton Neighbourhood Youth Steel Band at the School Steel Bands Festival at the Commonwealth Institute

Maurice Hibberd/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

23/25
Political visit

1978: Margaret Thatcher with Tory candidate Jerry Hanley climb up a ladder with steeplejack Chris Gowland, in Brixton to meet voters in the Lambeth Central by-election

John Dempsie/Associated Newspapers

24/25
Read all about it

1988: A news stand by the entrance to Brixton Tube

Martin Godwin/Getty Images

25/25
Popping down the shops

1988: Shops in Brixton

Martin Godwin/Getty Images

Watching Back in Time For Brixton feels more like enjoying a party than enduring a polemic but the show still does its bit to fight back against these attitudes. The Irwins’s social history re-enactments and Dabiri’s own contributions illustrate the many positive effects immigration has had on life in Britain.

In the series, the family gratefully graduate from the rock-hard government-imposed national loaf (an unappetising wholemeal brick) in the Forties to jerk chicken washed down with Lilt. There are also transformations in fashion, music, literature, sport, politics and everything else.

Outside of academia Dabiri likes taking walks to rediscover London’s hidden wildernesses, sometimes in the company of her four-year-old son, and she’s working on various documentaries and book proposals which she prefers to keep under wraps for now.

She is also a big fan of Zadie Smith (“just an incredible writer”) and has recently finished Smith’s latest novel Swing Time about the friendship of two mixed-race London girls — she was given a special advance copy by her rep at the literary agency both women share.

Emma Dabiri is a big fan of Zadie Smith

“There’s not necessarily a distinction between work and pleasure,” says Dabiri of her reading interests, but then her specialism has a pretty wide application. In fact, that’s the whole point. “In many ways Britain is the country it is because of its involvement with Africa, historically and because of the presence of black people here. So this is an integral part of the British story — for white people as well as for black people.”

Black, British and on the BBC

1. NW

BBC iPlayer, available now

This devastating adaptation of Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel isn’t strictly part of the season but it’s a must-watch companion

piece all the same.

2. Black and British: A Forgotten History

BBC2, November 23, 9pm

Clips from David Olusoga’s four-part documentary have already gone viral online. In it he explores Britain’s centuries-long relationship with Africa.

3. A Dot’s Story of Grime

BBC3 available from November 21

The 1Xtra DJ tells the story of Britain’s home-grown music genre by putting on her own ‘clash’.

4. Whites Vs Blacks: How Football Changed a Nation

BBC2, November 27, 9pm

Adrian Chiles’s documentary about racism in football at its most literal — in 1979 an all-white team took on a side of just black players in a testimonial at West Bromwich Albion.

5. Will Britain Ever Have a Black Prime Minister?

BBC iPlayer, available now

Anything is possible in modern politics, so why not this? Actor David Harewood asks the questions.